Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields

OF PARADIGMS & SCIENTISTS

"From their emotional, psychological, and linguistic preferences, we see that organicists continually return to a modified philosophical realism. The debate over the status of laws becomes a debate over the nature of form. Organicists reject the reductionistic approach primarily because they refuse to see the world as singular." [205-6]

"For Harrison the limb field is like a liquid crystal and unlike a jigsaw puzzle. for Needham the embryo is like history interpreted from a Marxist viewpoint and unlike an automobile with gear sifts. For Weiss butterfly behavior is like a random search and self-correcting device and unlike a deterministic stimulus-response machine. Such a catalog could be continued indefinitely, but the basic point is that organicists, even granting their internal differences, share central perceptions on the level of images and language." [205]

"In summary then, it is possible to maintain that there is a crucial discontinuity between vitalism -mechanism and organicism-reductionism. There has been a paradigm change, but a basic duality is preserved around a very important, if unresolvable, issue: Is the world one or many? Is knowledge literal and single or metaphoric and plural?" [199]

"Therefore, the position of this study is that there exists a basic difference between vitalists and organicists that rests on a switch from metaphysical to epistemological debate. But embedded in the epistemological claims remains a root belief that science can reveal nature. Biology must be autonomous because organisms are somehow different and unique, even if no clear explanation is given to show precisely how one can know hat. Reductionists allow organicists to proceed as if their field were logically and really independent, but at heart they believe that the truth is elsewhere. In like manner, organicists allow reductionists to proceed as if the world were single and simple but know that wisdom eludes them." [198-99]

"The concrete nature of models, metaphors, and artefacts, is essential to science because it limits the implications of any particular abstract system." [189]


PAUL WEISS

"The "weaving of threads into fabrics, such as we find in living tissu" seemed to necessitate the judgment that "some sort of 'macro-crystallinity' [was] a basic property of living systems"." [170]

"Weiss was profoundly impressed with orthogonal tissue organziation and its genesis. He frequently drew from the work in lectures and general speculative articles." [170]

"After observing the intact lamella, Weiss and Ferris took electron microscopic pictures of reconstruction of the membrane after wounding. The sequence of events was easily determined: Epidermal cells first migrated over and covered the wound. Fairly uniform fibers of small size (less than 200 A) spread in the space between the underside of the epidermis and the subjacent fibroblasts. These small fibers were oriented at random. Then, proceeding from the epidermal face downward, a "wave of organization" spread over the fiber mass, straightening and orienting its elements. The fibers became packed in the characteristic layered structure and enlarged until they were about 500 A in diameter." [170]

"But terms such as field and organization were not explanations in themselves. Weiss constantly stressed that fact and saw his study of chondrogenesis as a probe of the biotechnology that underlay field processes. The net of development had to be resolved into component processes if words such as field were not to be an excuse for analysis." [164]

"He countered Loeb's doctrine by insisting on the relevance of scale to the organism. Organization was based on a hierarchy of envelopes. To say that the operation of a higher level is based on the proper functioning of the components of a lower is not to say the operation of the higher can be reduced to the lower. Rather, the higher complex is given as a unit that requires its own laws. The distinction is the same as that made years later by Polanyi: boundary conditions left open by processes of a more elementary level are determined by the organizational plan of the next order." [149]

"The basic assumption of Loeb's doctrine was that a like result must imply a like causal chain: there exists a rigid material mechanism, which when completely revealed, would make possible strict prediction of every aspect of animal behavior. Furthermore, the relevant level of the animal was the chemical level. In his thesis work Weiss tested these assumptions by studying the resting behavior of fatigued butterflies." [148]


JOSEPH NEEDHAM

"The flowering of genetics has occupied attention at the expense of study of form and pattern. But at a deeper level it is possible to argue that a convergence has been prepared." [143]

"Thus Needham found himself forced to accept a radical dualism. Mechanism was necessary to science but could never deal with consciousness. Its success might be due only to the peculiar construction of our minds and have nothing to say about the structure of the natural world. He rejected any split between organic and inorganic but preserved the division between mind and body. He did not envision mind and body as ultimate categories but as aspects of reality that must not be confused." [125]

"The use of the fiber and tissue metaphor amply expresses Needham's mature conception of the resolution of the field-particle dichotomy in biological field theory." [125]

"... Needham saw field law as a dynamic description of the establishment of order and form during development. He was convinced that fields were an advance over static anatomical description in embryology. Fields provided a rich source of images for the experimental task of concretization." [125]

"Fields invited the introduction of topographical models and reasoning. For example, Needham described, a kind of qualitative mathematical model of an amphibian neurula." [125]

"Needham believed that fields were distinguished from simple geographic regions of the embryo by three criteria: any given point within the field force had to possess a given quality, a given direction, and a given intensity. Fields were judged in terms of instability and successive equilibrium positions." [124]

"The section called "The organization of development and the development of organization" contained two points of importance. The first concerned the relation of biology to physics. Traditional physics was incapable of explaining the development of form or organized growth. Needham stressed that a new physics and chemsitry would be required. "But their present condition is not a stationary one and much may be expected when the new concepts of physics, having penetrated the realm of chemistry [ see Langmuir] come at last to that of embryology" ... The reference to Langmuir highlighted the nature of the expected change in physics and chemistry: they would become sciences of structure and form, that is, they themselves would operate from organismic perspectives." [114]

"There are at least three interesting examples of the image of 'disengagement' that prompted Needham to ask further questions about the picture he was drawing. First, closely associated with the idea of gears is the notion of reversibility. He discussed this implication in the context of work on differentiation and regression in planaria and in sponges. Under conditions of starvation, planaria can reduce markedly in size without changing morphologically. But in ascidian regression, considerable dedifferentiation accompanies loss of mass ... The second example is Needham's search for a 'primary shaft' in development. He had distinguished two types of dependence on a whole: existential dependence, in which a part would cease to exist if separated from the whole, and dependence with regard to properties, in which certain aspects of isolated parts are modified. The latter was indicated by analysis of the relevant literature; there were definite boundaries to the independence of parts, definite selectivity in the engagement and disengagement of gears." [107]

"Explanation implies a picture, and analogy is a vehicle for connecting the internal subjective perception of the structure of a phenomenon with the public function of theory building." [106]


ROSS HARRISON

"The essential problem, however, was not true symmetrical organization but residual asymmetry of organisms; it was this study that occupied so much of Harrison's attention. In the speech Harrison explained that symmetry comes from commensurability and implies order, regularity, and arrangement. Geometrically symmetry is defined by operations of rotation, inversion, and translation. In nature. crystals and organisms embody the rules of symmetry; this simple fact underlies the historical analogy between crystal and organism. Harrison's work may be seen as a search for the appropriate degree and nature of the analogy in modern embryology. In our period, attention has been focused on internal laws of order for both sorts of entities; external form is a function of principles of arrangement, of inner patterning." [98]

"Some kind of paracrystalline organization, specific for a type of cytoplasm, would underlie form relations and form changes -- morphology and morphogenesis. Progressive orientation of protoplasmic elements (restriction of degrees of freedom) could account for polarity and symmetry, without any need to postulate the cell as a homogeneous system. Crystal organization in organisms was itself an example of an intermediate level of organization, joining processes of organic and inorganic nature. And perhaps most significantly, Harrison's use of crystal analogies allowed him to bypass assumptions of the mosaic-mechanistic theories of development about part-whole relations and to account for the existence of equipotential systems without turning to either entelechies or classical machines." [93]

"The concept of fields resulting from structured activity is a typical organicist resolution of the field-particle polarity. The resolution rests, essentially, on going beyond the structure-function dichotomies." [90]

"Which structure determined which? Harrison's conclusion was that "the emphasis upon 'determiner' and 'determined' leads to a very lopsided and often erroneous view of the process, for it is questionable whether one factor can influence another without itself being changed" ..." [87]

"Experimental method and the machine paradigm are by no means inseparable ..." [85]

"The abnormal and altered were pregnant with clues to normal processes; to ignore such sources of information would be to refuse to concretize concepts of form in embryology.
Organization and wholeness for Harrison were not answers to biological questions; they were the biological questions par excellence." [83]

"Birefringent material was seen in Harrison's material, especially at cell membranes. Harrison noted that their work was preliminary and should be followed up systematically. "Especially should the cell boundaries be examined thoroughly, for it is there, perhaps more than anywhere else in the cell, that we may expect to find the seat of directive forces" ... A glance at current journals in cell and developmental biology reveals the appropriateness of the admonition to study cell membrane systems in relation to form problems." [82]

"Area boundaries overlap, and tissue of an intermediate region is organized into one organ or another as a function of the center whose influence predominates. Such systems came to called fields, but it is not a word used by Harrison in that context until the late 1930s. As Waddington cautioned later, the term field should convey more than a geographical meaning; he suggested a term such as area or district when one does not intend to refer to the complex of processes involved in organ formation ... Harrison's discussion of structures and processes involved in axis determination of the limb and ear is an analysis of the nature of a field and constitutes one of the first and most basic of such studies. Harrison did not use the word field very often and especially not as a deliberate theoretical concept as Weiss would have done; but nonetheless, it was his fundamental work that first gave concrete content to the organicist notion." [80]


THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANICISM

"Asymmetry in organisms has historically been a cornerstone for theories of vitalism. Inorganic nature was widely felt to be the province of regular symmetry relations; the organic world was conceived as the realm of extraordinary spatial forms, such as the logarithmic spiral of Nautilus shells and the fivefold radial symmetry of starfish. Neither shape can be reduced to the simple geometry of crystalline space lattices. Crystals manifesting simple geometrical shapes surely were products of the laws of chemistry and physics, but the peculiar symmetries and asymmetries of organisms seemed to call for unique organizing principles." [48-49]

"Problems of form grade naturally into a consideration of symmetry, polarity, and pattern." [48]

"Tissue metaphors have been critical to an understanding of muscle fibres and more recently of microtubules and microfilaments Albrecht von Haller forthrightly states that "the fiber is for the physiologist what the line is for the geometer" ... The globular image important for the cell theory was an alternate early analogy for the fundamental structure of matter. These strongly visualizable forms are more than props for the imagination; they have been intrinsic to explanations of basic properties of life." [41]

"Biological forms are grown, not assembled piecemeal. That simple fact hides the immense difficulties of accounting for the genesis of a species or of an individual." [39]

"From an organismic perspective, the central and unavoidable focus of biology is form. Every other consideration of the biological sciences leads up to the task of at last stating the laws of organic form. Form is more than shape, more than static position of components in a whole. For biology the problem of form implies a study of genesis. How have the forms of the organic world developed? How are shapes maintained in the continual flux of metabolism? How are the boundaries of the organized events we call organisms established and maintained?" [39]


PARADIGM & METAPHOR

"For anyone in the eighteenth century to have felt that biology might be more fundamental (not just blessed with archaei, which is cheating) than physics would have been absurd. But that is exactly what J. S. Haldane thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was accused of being a vitalist; he was only a bit unclear. But Whitehead too insisted that the unity of science was based on organic 'events' rather than simple atoms; he was some what clearer." [25]

"Descartes' immense influence was a major factor in the dominant scientific belief after the mid-seventeenth century that the universe was composed of minute corpuscles. Particular kinds of motion and interaction were part of the world picture of Cartesian atomism." [10]

"This book attempts to trace in some detail a process of paradigm change in metaphor from machine to organic system that took the ground out from under atomism and animism alike in developmental biology." [7]


"... a view of scientific theory that does not give a large place to metaphor, with its predictive value and potential for development, has trouble accounting for the very progressive aspect of science such views are most often interested in." [3]


INTRODUCTION:

"Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields is also a polemic, one I would conduct differently today, but not one I would abandon. The narrative of this book is classical. A hero -- materialist organic systems theory -- defeats the dragons of mechanism and vitalism, which threaten the country of true biology with their fire-breathing, binary, reductive or idealist predations. Today, in debt to the last thirty years of feminism's life-changing critique of this cyclopean and teleological narrative form, I look for other ways to tell stories and build explanations. I now look for myriad connections and emergences that do not necessarily find their form in levels, hierarchies, and holist oppositions to fragmentation. Heroes are in short supply, but actors are proliferating." [xix]